The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

December 2, 2008

Pedro Garcia Cabrera

Pedro García Cabrera [Canary Islands]1905-1981

Born in Vallehermoso, La Gomera, Pedro García Cabrera stayed for some of childhood in his father's home in Seville, before returning the Canaries, where he lived until is death in 1981.

After secondary school, García Cabrera began writing for the Gaceta de Tenerife, later joining the staff of the magazine Hespérides. His first book of poetry, Líquenes (Lichens) appeared in 1928. A few years later he helped to found the important magazine of the Canarian indigensit movement, Cartones. And from 1932-1936, he was a founder of the Gaceta de Arte, representative of one of the brilliant cultural movements of the Islands. To Gaceta he contributed poems and essays, and the in 1934 the journal published his Transparencias fugadas (Fled Transparencies), one of the major documents of literary surrealism of the Canary Islands.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, García Cabrera was arrested for his socialist ideas and deported to Villa Cisneros, where he escaped. But upon the end of the War in 1936, he was again arrested and imprisoned until 1946, whereupon he returned to Tenerife to work as a diplomat. During these many years, he wrote numerous collections of poetry, including Dársena con despertadoes (Dock with Alarm Clocks), La rodilla en el agua (The Knee in the Water), Los senos de tina (The Breasts of Ink), Entre la guerra y tú (Between War and You), Romancero cautivo (Captive Ballad Book), La arena y la intimidad (Sand and Intimacy), Hombros e ausencia (Shoulders of Absence), and Viaje al interior de tu voz (Journey to the Interior of Your Voice)—all of which remained unpublished until his Obras completas (Complete Works) of 1987.

After that collection, he continued to produce many collections of poetry that established his reputation in the Canaries, including Vuelta a la isla (1968, Return to the Island), Entre cuatro paredes (1968, Between Four Walls), Hora punta del hombre (1969, Rush Hour of Man), Las islas en que vivo (1971, The Islands Where I Live), Elegías muertas de hambre (1975, Elegies Dying of Hunger), Ojos que no ven (1977, Eyes That Do Not See), and Haciala libertad (1978, Towards Freedom). Other books, uncompleted at his death, appear in his Obras completas.

Just as ghosts are not known for their habits,I want to explain the key to my best acts.So you will learnThatTo pschoanalyze the flight of butterfliesThere is not better device than the magnets of my beak.That I feel no envy for fogFor I myself am the true fog, adaptedTo the shape of my globetrotting desires.The fog you see in the field is just a mirageThat cannot endure the spiders of reflections.That an insect, using the insomnias of my longLace tail, can darken the night of someone's temples.What you will never know is if the roadsFace towards or away from passers-byFor it dependsOn which of my wings points to the wet of a cry.No one will be able to understand that my greaatest surpriseMay be to find a fair-haired violinOn a greedy plain of ice,Though he may know that the color of anxietiesIs that of weeping for a love ripened among nettles.The same for a snail as for a sigh as for a hoof,I would make a microphoneTo hear the gasping of water in the light's depths.If my death existed,I would send for it to be found deep in my eyesWith the first top hat that passed byDressed in burning feathers.There's just one word that inspires my tenderness.That one balancedOn the tip of a rhetorician's tongue.For me it never rains, but if it did,They would be Gothic letters and cottons in females.This is my alcohol. Sip it while you sleep.This time only I am going to lead youTo the angriest landscape on earth,Bleeding to the right of a fantasy of larks.No hopeBlinds me,Both because I am at once all blindnessesAnd because I slope down beyond every sea.

—Translated from the Spanish by Louis Bourne

(from Dársena con despertadores [1936] in Papeles Invertidos, 1980)

The open engagement

To the right of the voice of the statue's dreamA river of birds flows by.The river is a little girl and the bird a key.And the key a field of wheatThat opens a slow snail of a hundred days.This means the hills of broken menAre made of cardboard, wood and green walnuts.But don't touch that anguish; it's all from the SundayWhen they created the nests in which tomorrow the[adultuerous stones will brood.It's from that fish looking through the sea's eyeAt how war is the tenderness guarding the empty bedsAnd peace that blood with which feet spatter their chains.Let's go now. Don't pierce the shadow I had four years ago,For my fingers ache with hunger and my heart with rains.Better for you to sleep, to go on walking.I'll wait for you till the tigers, on the lake shore, after the[wine harvest,Lying farmhands to the fieldsAnd shoulders of someone on the deserted promises[without water.

—Translated from the Spanish by Louis Bourne

(from Entre la guerra y tú [1936-39] in Obras completas I, 1987)

The lark of good fortune

Give me your green hand, seaweed,Foam's faithful beloved,For in it I want to readThe sea's good fortune,That you are in loveNone has any doubt:Neither the beaches, nor the islands,Nor the eyes of the rain.Nor the rings, either,Of wakes surrounding you,Nor the breeze's doesRacing over the dunes.Anxieties' blue veinBeats in your ripe temples.The salt is always weavingOrange blossom for your wedding,The sky, branches of stars,The moon, ermine furs.And the fish can no longerSwim your deep watersWithout feeling they are nightingalesOf the caverns underwater.And further down, in yourLiquid shadows' depths,An instinct of coralsDreams naked throats.The bords of your domainsFly you feather beds;To you forest birds will bringEpithalamiums of fruits.(Here the green good fortuneOf seaweed is cut short,But I can add—Without boasting or bitterness—That if the sea fell in loveMore than he had ever done,It was because my sweet friendWet her feet in the foam.)

—Translated from the Spanish by Louis Bourne

(from Día de alondras, 1951)

Tacoronte

To Ernest Castro Fariñas

In this villageThe schoolboys drawSluggish landscapes of shadowWith greys dying of grief.The pomp of colorsHere amounts to nothing.Neither the sunflower of afternoonIn the skies, nor the slopeOf greens uphill,Nor even the blue lureOf a rainy foot on the seaAppear on their palates.For the man of these fieldsFeels his piece of earthSo deep inside himself,In his closest intimacy,That when at day's endHe sees his job fulfilled,The evening grey is alreadyAshes of the bonfireThat blazed, while he workedWithout lifting his head.The sunset's idle showNeither makes the grass sprout,Nor satisfies hunger and thirst,Nor reddems and frees him.he devotes himself to his hands,Hands with which he suddenlySows, in the same furrow,His freedom and his censure.He shares, from the lastThirsty melancholies,The equality of seedsIn the bosom of the earthAnd that round darknessOf the womb of harvetsTaking him back to the silenceOf maternal entrails.Silence of TacoronteHard as stone.When you move away fromThe highway's easy river,This silence follows youLike a bulldogAnd against him there's no useShutting windows and doors.Wherever you go,His tongue keeps licking you.This silence is the mustFermented by wine-cellars,The mirror in which rebellionsAnd sorrows see themselves.It is the lonelinessPainted by the schoolboys;It is the heart of man,His veins pulsing rage;Alone with ideas inside,Lonelier, ideas outside.Silence that never doubtsTreads firmly and testsWhat still remains in usOf island and volcano.And amidst this silenceThat yields to no one,The night of Tacorante,Vintageress of stars,Into the comfort of herDark tresses, lets sinkThe hands of him who worksAnd the brow of one who dreams.

—Translated from the Spanish by Louis Bourne

(from Vuelta a la Isla, 1968)

The broom

To my cousin, Rogelio Trujillo Cabrera, and Isabelita

She starts the day,Greeting the mosaics one by one,Stirring them in their calling as mirrors.What joy to scatter so much night,To erase so many rings under eyes,To make the shadows leave in flight!What a job hers, setting in motionThe linked activity of the things we love,And they have almost managed to become us,Lend us features, even a name,The labored name of our preferences,Earned with bare hands from years,Building a face of surprisesWith the flow of each instant,The name we choose through that cosmosOf Habits and familiar belongings,More real than the other given us by our parents.And how a chore so flooredCan produce a dawn so difficult!She preludes the orchestrated swarmOf taps, the water's music,The good days of oiled hinges,Swaying her amazon breedIn passages, on patios and pavements,Happy as a harpPlaying in the energy of two arms.If only her press for purity could clean awayStabbing ice, grim criesAnd clouds of ash.If she could at least take the dirt from our eyesSo we could see the linked lightStriking the walls outside and our foreheads.The broom also feels misfortunes,At times sweeping up tearsAnd the broken windowpanes of dreams,And even genuine pieces of herself,The useless feet of her hope,Dead now the wish of walking by herself.But without her Cindrella hustling,The house could never get up,Nor welcome friends,Nor serve as a horse for the little ones.For there is a great deal of grandmotherIn the humanity of a broom.

—Translated from the Spanish by Louis Bourne

(from Entre cuatro paredes, 1968)

A bud from the sea...

To Justo Jorge Padrón

A bud from the sea has reached my feet.UnexpectedlyIt sprouted from the womb of a waveWith its body of sobings and murmursAs if it were truly a life.Such pure vapor,Such seething milk,Crowned its hurried existenceSo its spark of water left an openingNot even to memory.I have hardly been able to keep an instantIts time of dying,Its swift birth to death.And maybe the whole soul of an island,More than an obsession of rocks standing fast,Is a bud of binding sea.

—Translated from the Spanish by Louis Bourne

(from Las islas en que vivo, 1971)

Hegemony of gadgets

Other forests came. New wyasOf wilting shadow desposedGreen lattices, the leaves forebodingCoffered rhythms.They condemned ears of grain to death.The washing out of leafage was totalIn valleys and mountains and plains.Everything throbbedBy the kiss of a flowerCollapsed.And earth filled up with scaffoldingsThat were affected neither by springsNor senile autumns.One single season,In the chaos of spurrings, they imposedIndustrial centers.Orchestras of emtal symphoniedCoulds of smoke. Diagrams of sabbatsMaddened connecting rods and lightning bolts.The lights kicked. They plunged usInto the poverty of a sigh.

After so much crime,Of murdering valid wordsFor the sake of plastics,They found a cloverThat had been saved from the fire.The subjugated machines stopped,Seeing the freedom of that marvel.And the asphalt gave birth to green eyes,Seeing the courage of a leaf.